The thing is, recall is a virtuous cycle. The better a medium supports recall, the easier it is to attach new information in the right places. Which makes recall even easier. And the easier it is to add content, the faster this process snowballs. So a compound interest effect.
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Knowledge generally depreciates, and a holy grail of knowledge modeling and capture for a long time has been to reverse the default negative interest rate it accrues and turn it positive. There was a “knowledge banking” project at Xerox back in the day that aimed at this for eg.
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In the past most such efforts have failed because they relied on automation to try and keep entropy at bay, which sort of works weakly with relative legible and structured information. But for more squishy information, the only thing that works is a “many eyeballs” process.
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Anytime I’ve seen a positive-interest-rate knowledge repo, it’s because many people were resurfacing bits and pieces at random and making point improvements. So the only known solution to date for positive interest rate has been to collectivize and socialize the prosthetic memory
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So a good measure of the technical sophistication of a medium is to measure the number of people (eyeballs) and money (how much they’re paid) required to sustain a positive interest rate. I think Roam reduces both to the limit: 1 person and self-funded hobby time.
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Compare for instance Wikipedia (~100s-1000s unpaid) or Stanford Encyclopedia or Wolfram Mathworld (single digits -100s, but paid, directly it indirectly). This is probably because Roam allows one mind to effectively act as many (Fox > Hedgehog)
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In practice, I’m finding now that when I have a new nugget to add, from whatever headspace I’m in (working, at the gym, random thought during in a meeting, half-asleep thought in bed), I can always make a quick judgment of approximately where a thought belongs, and put it there.
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By contrast in weaker media, I have to be in high energy, direct focus headspace, having warmed up around 30 minutes to get situation awareness around the whole project. Only then can I reliably lower entropy and turn interest rate positive. Roam lowers threshold to 10% of that.
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This btw is the maker time/manager time problem pg wrote about. Making needs 4 hour chunks because anything less tends to increase entropy rather than decrease it in any non-trivial knowledge work project. So anything that lowers that lower limit is a big win.
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Replying to @vgr
I've been following your
@RoamResearch exploration with interest. I use Microsoft OneNote in ways that may be similar; curious whether you or others might be able to give me a sense of how/where Roam's capabilities are distinct from OneNote1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
From my limited use of OneNote and Evernote they’re both a generation too primitive and optimized fir a different style of thinking so they’re not on this spectrum.
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Replying to @vgr @RoamResearch
Do I understand correctly that: whereas OneNote forces a user to create information hierarchies of Notebooks --> Tabs --> Sections/Subsections --> Pages/Subpages, Roam allows an endless (or at least less limited) set of user-defined relationships between entities?
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